The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...

You do it. We all do. You see an interesting story and share the URL with a friend. Or maybe you just copy a couple of sentences and paste that into an email.

You're just being social. But for the publisher, that's known as dark social because it results in traffic that comes from unknown sources.

Luis Aguilar has been on the trail of dark social for about three years now as a product manager for Po.st, an offshoot of programmatic advertising agency Radium One. Po.st offers tools that help publishers track that traffic.

Content marketing and mobile are the digital marketing buzzwords for 2015. Next year, techniques like personalization, targeting and testing will be non-negotiable CMS features — and here's why.

Your customers are empowered like never before. They seek out information about your business on their own terms, on their own time. And they’ve got options: Google search, reviews, forums and social media all combine to shape their image of your company and its offerings.

If they’re interested, they can choose to visit your site or download your app. It’s their call. If you want to engage them, you have to provide appropriate, relevant and entertaining information. And make sure it is accessible on mobile, which has overtaken desktop consumption in the past year.

Forget Hawaiian Islands, ski houses in Aspen and geeked out yachts, this year Oracle CEO CTO Larry Ellison is buying himself a data-tracking firm for Christmas.

This morning Oracle announced its intent to acquire Datalogix, a “Data-as-a-Service” analytics provider that helps brands glean insights on customer purchasing patterns. Datalogix's unique value proposition to the market is that it can help brands determine if ad clickers actually ever walk into stores to purchase the goods they’ve shown interest in.

Though the amount of the acquisition is unknown, earlier this month AdExchanger reported that Datalogix was shopping itself around for as much as $1 billion. It was rumored, at that time, that Nielsen, Adobe and even Facebook were kicking its tires.

After spending more than 10 years as an integrated marketer and social media leader at Intel and Accenture, she went on to become the co-founder and CMO of Branderati, which was acquired by Sprinklr earlier this year. Somewhere along the way, she found time to write two books, "Think Like Zuck" and "The Power of Visual Storytelling" and also gained recognition for her innovative thinking.

The holidays can be a particular challenge for email marketers as they face increased competition and the risk of over-saturating consumer inboxes with campaigns that may or may not be seen during the holiday crunch-time. If only there could be a reliable recipe for success, something as easy as one-part list hygiene, two-parts testing and “send” in small batches until done.

Is email marketing as easy as this? Well, no, but just like home cooks can feel like master chefs if they follow the instructions and use high quality ingredients, email marketers can greatly improve results if they stick to a tried-and-true recipe.

It's been an interesting couple of weeks for Digital River. Its deadline to re-sign Microsoft to an extension of the Microsoft Operations Digital Distribution Agreement, which would continue Digital River provision of Microsoft Store’s e-commerce platform beyond March, 2015 came and went on Dec. 1. While only a handful of people might have noticed, the company made a bigger splash on Dec. 8 when it announced an extension of the negotiation timeframe until Dec. 19.

Digital River's stocks rose and fell with the ups and downs of the announcements, dropping almost 25 percent from its close of $25.51 on Friday, Dec. 5, to $19.71 on Monday, Dec. 8. The stock eventually bottomed at $16.58 on Dec. 11, a drop of 35 percent in less than a week. On the power of yesterday's news the stock closed at $24.08, a 45 percent jump from last week’s low.

B2B marketers use analytics and gain value from them in their campaigns and marketing programs, a survey released today claims.

But earlier this year, another study claimed otherwise. It found only about a third of organizational projects include marketing analytics. And it further claimed there has been no significant gains for how marketing analytics contribute to a company's overall performance.

Who do you believe? Your call.

Today is ON24's day in the sun. The webinar-based marketing solutions provider based its findings on a survey distributed last month to 221 US-based B2B marketers experienced with marketing analytics. Redshift Research administered the survey and ON24 released the results today.

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In an early post on tag management systems, I noted how these systems would provide a great flexibility in measuring customer behavior in the growing information anywhere and anytime environment. Laptops with Wi-Fi access have supplanted desktops in sales popularity, while mobile devices are as essential now as a wallet or purse. Consumers can access retailer information anywhere and anytime.

One driver of the growing need for cross device analysis is webrooming and showrooming, both retail-related activities stemming from holiday shopper activity during past few seasons. Webrooming is the retail customer behavior of researching products and services while in a store. It differs from showrooming, an in-store behavior in which customers compare prices and research features, leading to a purchase online.

Both trends signal the need to understand foot traffic that is likely to become web traffic, including traffic from customers researching products in the privacy of a home.

The fact is that it is critical to add an analytics solutions to accurately capture that traffic. And adding a User ID in a Google Analytics script captures the best cross device behavior to enhance a marketing strategy.

The central message of 2014 for digital marketers couldn't be much clearer: give customers the information they need on whatever devices they're using.

That theme surfaced again Tuesday in a CMSWire webinar sponsored by Ektron, "Website Redesign: Strategy First, Tactics Second." Two Ektron executives, CEO Bill Rogers and CMO Lou Jordano, provided a roadmap they said will help marketers attract more business from different types of customers. You can watch the webinar here or at the end of this story.

"It's tactics that win marketing battles, but strategy that wins wars," said Jordano, who led the first part of the presentation. "You have to have your website strategy clearly in mind before kicking off any redesign or rebranding project."

Do you think there's a need for better engagement models with digital advertising? 21st Century Fox agrees with you. Today the company announced it is buying true[x] media, a digital advertising company focused on driving more consumer engagement with advertising.

The deal shows that despite the plethora of advertising formats and technologies, media markers and consumers are still not fully satisfied with the digital advertising experience. Concerned about the metrics and engagement levels ads are delivering, media companies are looking for better advertising solutions, especially those that can prove more value for their customers.

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The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...